There’s not a lot of work out there for an amateur eschatologist like me, even pro bono. So when a friend asked me to sit on a panel to discuss the apocalypse during an end-of-the-world house party, I immediately agreed.
My fascination with apocalypses started early, first with B-movies and Arthur C. Clarke short stories, and then blossomed as I finished my degree in English literature. I’ve since cultivated a reputation as an expert on all things Armageddon among friends. Wonder how Eastern Europeans thought the Kingdom would come during the Cold War? I have four book recommendations for you. Needless to say, on more than one night at the bar, I’ve ruined my chances for dates by rambling about the architecture of ’50s-era fallout shelters to bored women.
A small bookcase next to my bed holds a modest library of apocalyptic texts. Don DeLillo paperbacks are stacked on top of virology studies, post-Peak Oil handbooks, and zines cobbled together by schizophrenics. Tony Kushner bumps elbows with Chinua Achebe and Tim LaHaye. Zombies, jökulhlaups, Christian Zionists—name the end-times scenario, it’s crammed onto the shelf somewhere.
Impressing the audience of the apocalyptic panel—or at least passing on some esoteric information—should be a cinch, I thought, and, like all easy tasks, I put it off. Very un-apocalyptic thinking. But about a week ago, I started to worry. The party, the roundtable, and the most recent alleged doomsday were nigh. I plopped down on my bedroom floor and started pulling books off the shelf one after another, hunting for a discussion topic.
I started with what I know best: classic sci-fi and the atomic era, Robert A. Heinlein and Hiroshima, “The Martian Chronicles” and the Manhattan Project. The twentieth century is the origin of our current apocalyptic preoccupations, but it also seems anachronistically genteel. Quaint, even. I wanted discuss broader ideas, so I went farther back in time.
Part of me really wanted to present something inherently spiritual: the Enuma Elish or the Book of Revelation or another apocryphal jeremiad. The language of scripture is evocative and important, but I worried that yammering on about ancient theological texts to a room full of half-drunk college grads would swiftly rapture them off to the refrigerator’s dwindling stock of beer bottles. Perhaps something more contemporary but still religious in nature? I considered A Canticle for Leibowitz: too Catholic. Then “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: too preachy. Then the Left Behind series: no matter how little time is left on earth, I rationalized, there’s never a bad time to take a few potshots at Kirk Cameron. Right?
Ultimately, I decided against a theological focus too. When most people imagine the apocalypse these days—especially the types that would be attending this party—they’re more concerned with secular explanations. Ask a roomful of people how they think the world will end and ninety-five percent believe it’ll be at the idle hands of a dozing nuclear silo operator, on the heels of human-induced climate change, or synthesized in a corporate pharmaceutical laboratory. But the media is full of technological and environmental doom and gloom. Who needs more of that?
I knew I was dead-set on avoiding the Mayan apocalypse, even if the last few days of the Mayan long-count calendar were the excuse for throwing an end-of-the-world party in the first place. But there’s something sterile, artless, and unthreatening about this particular apocalyptic story. Even if Nibiru were demonstrably careening toward Earth, it doesn’t have the same moral or existential urgency that has kept writers from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Ray Bradbury to Thomas Aquinas awake at night. It’s too New Age, seemingly prefabricated to sell movie rights and hog the cover of Time magazine.
In short, nothing seemed appropriate.
I had pulled nearly all of my books out of the case, as well as a handful from another bookshelf, and was now surrounded by a small sea of apocalyptic literature. I felt like Noah on the deck of his ark: water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. As I held each book, I heard T.S. Eliot’s raspy voice in my ear repeating, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” I couldn’t commit; it felt like my expertise had been obliterated along with my capacity for decision-making. Why did I procrastinate so long? Time is running out, I thought morbidly.
But then I remembered a line from the third canto of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: “But yet the end is not.”
Those six words are one of the most powerful and blatant utterances of apocalyptic deferral in Western literature. Similar to procrastination, apocalyptic deferral is the moment when a prophet, doomsayer, or otherwise paranoid individual acknowledges that the planet is still spinning and abundantly populated, and needs to explain why. Save the occasional Kool-Aid-drinking cult, so far every apocalyptic prognosticator has been required to make an apocalyptic deferral. Better luck next time!
Deferral is certainly a relevant concept to the people who’ll be attending the end-of-the-world fandango. They’re deferring their careers while working at bookstores or upscale farm-to-table restaurants. Deferring student loans until they stop deferring their career. Deferring a family until they don’t need to defer their loans.
And isn’t that the party’s raison d’etre? To defer the revelation of adulthood? To laugh about everyone else’s hysteria after midnight and pretend a little longer that our post-college purgatory will last? Or, maybe, to say something clever to a cute religious studies grad student moments before the Earth is smashed to smithereens? Or to indulge in a full lowball as our friends are raptured, leaving tidy piles of thriftstore-bought clothes on the kitchen floor?
I could say that there’s still time for one more drink, I thought as I started thumbing through The Faerie Queene. There’s at least one more chance to impress that grad student, at least one more month before the loans start coming due, at least one more end of the world to celebrate. We’re in for the long haul tonight, I could say. The canon of apocalyptic literature is proof.
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